Do any of you have pet insurance ?

[rfuerst911sc]

I have owned dogs all my life and recently rescued a 9 month old pup . Not sure how " they " found out but I have received a few emails from pet insurance companies . I received one today for $15.00 a month .

I have never had pet insurance but with the increased costs of vet visits I could see where they might have value . So if any of you have pet insurance how has it worked out for you ? Did you go with a plan recommended by your vet ? I assume there are deductibles and items it doesn't cover ?

Or do most of you guys just pay out of pocket and be done with it ? I would like to hear from both sides . Thanks

[stevej37]

I have no pet right now (except turtles)...but my sister has a dog that just went through dental surgery.
Abscessed teeth and needed to be removed.
I'm sure pet ins would have been a good move...but she didn't have it.

[craigster59]

A buddy at work has a dog that ate the squeaker from one of his toys. Got lodged in his digestive tract and the vet bill came to $5k.

I have Trupanion insurance, recommended by my vet. I think it's $60 a month and once you pay $500 out of pocket Trupanion picks up the rest.

https://trupanion.com/

[varmint]

the new heeler is death prone. thinking seriously about insurance for him.

[Sooner or later]

Originally Posted by varmint

the new heeler is death prone. thinking seriously about insurance for him.

Death prone? This isn't life insurance.

I sat my mutt down and told her a max of $1000 a year. She understands.

[stevej37]

hmmm...

"If you can't afford Pet Assure, you can't afford a Turtle.
Pet Assure is a low - cost pet insurance alternative. It's perfect for Turtle! Learn why more than 100,000 households have chosen Pet Assure for their pets."

https://www.petassure.com/education/exotic-breeds/turtle-insurance

[911 Rod]

Like all insurance it's a lottery.
The devil is in the details I'm sure.
My wife spends the equivalent for one cat as I do on one of my cars each year.
I doubt the insurance covers it when you take the cat to the vet because it sneezes. lol

[Mike80911]

I did not take insurance for my last cat even though I kept meaning to sign up but I never did. When he got sick with cancer I spent thousands of dollars on tests and treatments and eventually had to stop and just put him down. If I had the insurance I would have saved thousands and been able to continue treatment and pay the thousands more it would have cost. I will never have a pet again without insurance. We even have insurance on my sons pet Chinchilla.

[944 S2]

Not so common here, much more common in the UK. I Wonder how much do they cover?

[McLovin]

Originally Posted by craigster59

A buddy at work has a dog that ate the squeaker from one of his toys. Got lodged in his digestive tract and the vet bill came to $5k.

I have Trupanion insurance, recommended by my vet. I think it's $60 a month and once you pay $500 out of pocket Trupanion picks up the rest.

$720/yr for insurance premiums on a pet, plus $500 deductible?
Ah, no.
No pet insurance, but I have pet assurance, and it’s $0 per year: I can assure you that no pet of mine will ever have a $5000 vet bill!

[varmint]

Originally Posted by Sooner or later

Death prone? This isn't life insurance.

I sat my mutt down and told her a max of $1000 a year. She understands.

At four months old the wee baby jumped out the back of my wife’s rig and shattered his hind femur like a lightbulb. $6000 ****ing dollars later he still has his leg.

I sat him down afterwards and explained that this was his one shot. Next time amputation only costs $400.

[varmint]

[speeder]

Timely subject. I don't have any animals right now but I am the dog father of this guy:


He is a Dachshund mix. A few weeks ago, he's playing in the yard and suddenly drops to the ground, screaming in pain. Slipped a disc somehow, I guess it's common for the breed. It had a longer name but the bottom line was that he needed emergency surgery from a specialist or it was put him down.

My lady friend who owns the dog scooped him up and took him to one of those emergency vets, (there are at least a couple in town). I have previous experience w the place, they see you coming and ask for a credit card up front before they will even look at the animal, you need to authorize a couple grand or something on it. This is even if you scoop a dog or cat off the road that someone else hit, etc.

Anyhow, they knew exactly what had happened to the dog after an exam and they referred her to a vet neurologist who specializes in the surgery the dog needed. This specialist wanted $10k upfront to do the surgery. I tried gently explaining how sometimes putting an animal down is the right thing to do and she wasn't having it. I was absolutely sure that I was going to be paying for this highway robbery and then the strangest thing happened...she started a GoFundMe for the mutt and something like $6k flooded in immediately from Dachshund lovers around the world and some other friend of hers had a $4500 credit on some type of vet policy, it all came together and paid for the surgery and my bank account was unscathed. Couldn't fking believe it.

So yeah, pet insurance might not be a bad idea.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Used to have it. Dumped it. By the time you get through the deductibles and exclusions it really didn’t cover much of anything but that’s the nature of insurance - getting you to bet against yourself and always lose.

I “self insure” now and I’m happy. Yes there’s the risk of needing to pay a big vet bill but that’s my decision. I’ll do a lot for my pets but money and how much I’m willing to pay is a real factor - as it should be with human healthcare too. It doesn’t mean we love our pets (or relatives) any less. It only means we’re being pragmatic and considering the real cost of care.

I don’t know why people are so reluctant to put a dollar value on human life (or a pet’s life - and I definitely consider my pets absolutely part of my family and life and love them to pieces). I think we should be willing to go through that exercise but people act horrified by this notion and feign indignation instead - opening the door for crookery (a la “insurance sales”) and exploitation... not to mention the bazillion-dollar healthcare industry that pops up around providing endless treatments to terminally ill people at the end of their lives, capitalizing on their HC proxies’ squeamishness to set a dollar cap on what their relative’s life is worth - just like the insurance companies do incidentally (they just don’t talk about it much - it’s driven by actuarial data to ensure that just like Vegas, “the house never loses”).

I’m seriously considering building a dollar cap into my health care proxy and power of attorney (that my kids will get when I’m older). When it costs $X they’ll be instructed to pull the plug. It has nothing to do with love or not loving them or them not loving me - it has everything to do with making sure they don’t get taken advantage of by sleazeballs.

And so it should be with our pets too. What are you willing to pay for their care under what circumstances? It depends - what quality of life, how long, prognosis, etc.?

Honestly I think insurance just obfuscates that hard reality and decision - and ends up costing us all a fortune in money and many in needless suffering when they should be allowed to expire - as is natural... when it’s their time.

[speeder]

One thing that you can do proactively is to talk to a major veterinary school in your region BEFORE something catastrophic happens, see what their procedures are for getting your animal in for treatment.

Back in the mid-'90s, I was in Minneapolis for the summer w my German Shepard and he stepped on a broken bottle or something in the woods, (never did find it), cut his leg so bad right above the paw that he nearly severed it. Cut through the tendons, etc. Gnarly injury.

I scooped him up and brought him to the nearest vet, they told me that it was way above their ability to repair the injury and suggested I take him to the University of MN. agriculture campus and school of veterinary science. It's one of the best in the country.

I did and they agreed to operate on my dog, no guarantees but they would do their best. I picked him up a couple days later in a cast up to his shoulder but happy and limping along. He healed 100% and if I remember right, there was no bill because they used him as a training exercise. Of course, the greatest staff surgeon did the actual procedure w students all around him watching. They told me that he may never play the piano again but otherwise he'd be right as rain. What amazing people...it's all coming back to me.

I thought of that when the Dachshund injury happened recently but she did not want to take the time to research vet schools, it was too much of an emergency and she had already found a surgeon. I decided right there that it's a good idea too research it in advance if you have critters.

[unclebilly]

As farmers, we get off at the vets a bit easier than city folk...

The vet we deal with does large animals and small animals but we get billed the same no matter who they are working on. We have a great relationship with all 4 vets at the clinic, I’ve been there in the middle of the night a few times with sick calves, they’ve been to our place countless times. When they come out, we try to get them to check out our cat and dog too if needed while they are here.

They are all super practical there and fully understand that every dollar we pay them is a dollar less we will make on a given animal. We have a cabinet full of medicines for cattle, some are ok for other animals too. I’ve given thousands of injections, my wife is a pro at stuffing a hose down into a calf’s stomach to relieve bloat, we’ve treated acidosis with glycol-p drenches, it’s what we do.

City vets can be extortionists. Our old vet in the city, saw my Porsche and tried getting us to cough up $4500 to determine what type of heart murmur our old dog had. Based on the diagnosis, we would treat with 1 of 2 types of meds. I told her that my approach would be to start with one med (the cheaper one) and if that didn’t clear it up, we would switch meds. In the end we switched vets and the new vet was not able to detect a heart murmur. That dog lived to 17.

[Sooner or later]

Uncle, I take my mutt to a country vet. Nearly every time I take her to the place there is stock trailer or two in the parking lot and they are working on a horse, pig, cow, or sheep. Much less expensive than in town.

[Purrybonker]

The purpose of insurance is to protect against catastrophic loss, or put another way, losses that are either impossible, untimely or inconvenient to absorb.

Entering into an insurance gambit with the idea of saving money on an extended timeline is an irrational proposition.

Pet insurance would seem to fall readily into that category.

[unclebilly]

Originally Posted by Purrybonker

The purpose of insurance is to protect against catastrophic loss, or put another way, losses that are either impossible, untimely or inconvenient to absorb.

Entering into an insurance gambit with the idea of saving money on an extended timeline is an irrational proposition.

Pet insurance would seem to fall readily into that category.

Agreed. I still think having a large animal vet is cheaper in the long run than pet insurance. I ran our idiot dog over with my truck 2 years ago, all in with 1 emergency Sunday morning callout, X-rays, minor surgery, Anesthesia (4x) - once for the surgery and 3 times to replace bandages, 4 visits total cost a whopping $800. Less than $1000.

The vet told me when I brought her in that he recognized that all of these costs were discretionary. This dog was a rescue and this was the second time she had been hit by a car. The x-rays revealed a whole bunch of previous fractures. Based on the way she behaves when the school bus shows up (10x a week), I think she may have seen the underside of a school bus the first time.

She made a full recovery.

[blucille]

We use petplan and they’ve been very good with us. Our older black lab (now 11) just had a cyst removed from her head, stitches, anesthesia, all covered. A couple thousand bucks if we had to pay out of pocket, When she was 3 she tore an ACL, it’s very common when one gets torn, the other will go, too....petplan covered both surgeries, went well into 5 figures. That surgery paid the cost of the insurance for life. It was a little touch and go, since they needed proof it wasn’t a pre-existing condition, but we had record of a vet visit one year prior that fit within their window of proof.....all good.